Well done Al Gore!

but in the meantime, I am planning.  I look forward to preparing this with home-grown carrots, perhaps tangerine juice from our tree, and some wintery herb, since dill will not be growing at that time.  This recipe reminds me that I really. really. must get a proper crop of carrots this year for Pete’s sake. Carrots have not gone terribly well for me. I’ll explain more later, but for now, let’s just enjoy this
UPDATE: I went home for lumch and used some leftover carrots, lemon juice & basil. Tasty!

Way to go Caltech! They are really running with this olive harvest festival thing. The graphics look great and they have really organized it well, it seems. This is a great blow for localism as well as eating what is grown. It is a little silly to think about these olive trees producing hundreds of pounds of olives that were simply disposed. I understand that they were actually sprayed to reduce fruiting. Regardless, it is cool of Caltech to go to the trouble, when from a facilities standpoint, I am sure that it was just easier to spray and ignore.

I saw this spear shooting through a bush in Pasadena.  It seem to taste like asparagus, but it is from the same frondy material that is also growing through the bush, which does not strike me as aspargus-y.  So I don’t know.

Just in case you wondered where saffron comes from.  It is the pistil of the saffron crocus, pictured below.  I just got the above corms in the mail, though I am afraid that they are a little late, but I think that early October might qualify as late September.  This is a classic purchase for me.  Much of my learning about cooking has come from growing things that I thought were cool.  And then I grow things I want to eat.  It is a virtuous, tasty circle.

While these weren’t grown in my front yard, these apples were growing in the mountains of Yosemite, where I spent the weekend with three very good friends. It snowed & we hiked, biked, and otherwise thoroughly enjoyed ourselves.

And I ate a mess of fresh apples crisp and cold from the tree!

This is great: Front-Yard Up Front

I have been slightly obsessed with trying to get my hands on some fresh sardines for the last ~5 months or so.

“WHY?!?” you might ask as do most people who hear of my quest.  Well, it has to do with my interest in simple foods, low-environmental impact, and local foods.   Mostly, I got hooked by reading this blog and being inspired a bit by his approach to food which mostly matched my growing sense of food preparation that was so compatible with growing my own tasty food.

Well, I finally came across some at Whole Foods yesterday.  They only get them once every couple of months and there is no set schedule.  Here they are awaiting their fate:

Here they are awaiting their final fate:

So, after all this waiting, how were they?  Well, they tasted a lot like trout.  They had a slightly stronger flavor.  As for preparation, I simply dredged them in thyme & flour and sauteed in hot oil with scattered sea salt.  I need to bone them next time as well.  I actually need to work a bit on their preparation beforehand.  However, it was a great first attempt, and of course they “paired” quite nicely with a cold Fat Tire.

My approach needs some work before I will convince Maggie to give them a go. 

That is a picture of some olives ripening on the tree at Caltech.

I will post more about this when the day gets closer, but Caltech has decided to put all of the olive trees on its famed “olive walk” to good use.  This year we will be harvesting all of the olives & sending them to a processor in Santa Barbara to be turned into olive oil.  It will be sold and proceeds going to charity.  Very local, very cool.

Straight from the garden, and man(!) it was good.

I took this rosa bianca eggplant (yes it is October, and I am still harvesting a couple eggplants!)

and I dipped in some flour and fried it in some oil, drizzled some lemon juice (from back yard) and sprinkled a little salt:

so good!!! crusty shell with creamy, eggplanty goodness inside.